For one week in July, two of Dalston's most-loved rooms are given over to Paul McCarthy. The American artist — widely held to be among the most influential of his generation — arrives for a four-night programme that sets his pioneering video performances against the experimental sound work he has been making, largely out of view, for the best part of half a century. It opens with a rare cinema screening at the Rio on 9 July and continues with a three-night residency at Cafe OTO from 10 to 12 July. The run is presented by I-D.A Projects with McCarthy Studios.
The Rio night: McCarthy will introduce, in person, a selection of video works spanning 1970 to 2025 — from the early Black and White Tapes through to the UK premiere of Mother, a newly completed episode from A&E, the ongoing project he has been developing with the German actress Lilith Stangenberg since 2019. Across performance, theatre, video and installation, that series circles power, violence and toxic co-dependency, and it extends the preoccupations that have run through McCarthy's work from the start: the body, fantasy, discomfort, theatricality and the darker machinery of social life.
The programme gathers Ma Bell (1971), Face Painting – Floor, White Line (1972), Whipping a Wall with Paint (1974) and the 43-minute Sailor's Meat (1975) before closing on Mother. These are early, unruly things — a Los Angeles telephone directory, cotton and motor oil in one; white paint dragged across a wall in another — and they belong to a moment when McCarthy was trying to break painting open using whatever came to hand, including food, bodily fluids and industrial materials. The Rio has flagged the screening as unsuitable for under-18s, with images that some viewers may find disturbing.
Then the week turns from image to sound. From 10 July, McCarthy decamps a few streets over to Cafe OTO, the Ashwin Street venue that has become the international home of experimental music, for three nights of vocals and guitar alongside long-time collaborators. The thread runs back to the Los Angeles Free Music Society, the West Coast noise collective formed in the mid-1970s, and to Extended Organ, its best-known offshoot.
McCarthy's involvement dates to the late 1970s, when LAFMS members kept studios in the derelict 35 South Raymond building in Pasadena, where the artist also worked; he went on to co-found Extended Organ in 1995 with Joe Potts, Tom Recchion and Fredrik Nilsen. The late Mike Kelley, McCarthy's sometime collaborator, was in the group from 2000 to 2012.
The core quartet across the residency is McCarthy, Joe Potts on the self-built "Chopped Optigan" drone instrument, Rick Potts on electronic and customised acoustic instruments, and Alex Stevens on processing and synths. Each night brings a different cast of guests and openers.
Friday 10 July is anchored by Nathaniel Mellors, the Doncaster-born, LA-based multimedia artist who records with The God in Hackney and has shown everywhere from the Venice Biennale to the New Museum. The opening set comes from DREAM_MEGA, the dystopian one-man project of Joel Kyack, whose new LP landed earlier this year, with Keel Her — the recording alias and NTS show of Rose Keeler-Schaffeler — on DJ duty.
Saturday 11 July hands the guest slot to Charles Hayward, founding drummer of the era-defining This Heat and Camberwell Now, still restlessly prolific with Abstract Concrete. He turns up twice, in fact: he also plays in Classic Form Morf, his radio-scavenging duo with bassist Nathan Greywater, who share the opening bill with the violinist and electroacoustic composer Agate (Agathe Max). Simon Parris, the fashion-and-film DJ and NTS host, selects.
Sunday 12 July closes with David Toop, the writer, curator and musician whose books — Rap Attack, Ocean of Sound, Sinister Resonance — have shaped how a couple of generations think about sound, and who has played with everyone from Derek Bailey to Ryuichi Sakamoto. Opening are Nik Colk Void, of Factory Floor and Carter Tutti Void, and National Rails, a self-described "cat-punk family band" who mostly write songs about their cat. Charles Bullen, Hayward's This Heat bandmate, brings the week to a close on the decks.
Paul McCarthy: Selected Video Works, 1970–2025 Rio Cinema, 107 Kingsland High Street E8 2PB Thursday 9 July 2026. Recommended for over-18s only.
Paul McCarthy, Joe Potts, Rick Potts and Alex Stevens Cafe OTO, 18–22 Ashwin Street E8 3DL Friday 10, Saturday 11 and Sunday 12 July 2026.
